You are here

Ronnie Adams

YARMOUTH, Maine—The PERS space has been evolving much in the past several years, now with several conferences that discuss the topic, including the MAMA annual meeting, Affiliated Monitoring’s Catalyst and The PERS Summit.

KING OF PRUSSIA, Pa.—Wearable Health Solutions, formerly Medical Alarm Concepts, is moving from its original direct-to-consumer model to a dealer-only model with its new mPERS offering, the iHelp + 3G.

“The goal of this product and our company is to sell to dealers and to give them everything that they would need to help them to sell this product, and that includes the dealer portal,” Jennifer Loria, Wearable Health Solutions COO told Security Systems News.

The company is looking to roll-out its new mPERS in the end of January 2017. The company is currently sending out demos—“We’re ready and we’re excited about it,” Ronnie Adams, company president and CEO, told SSN.

Adams said that the company’s new name, unveiled in June, aligns it with the wearable field, a key aspect of medical alert devices.

The iHelp + 3G mPERS stands out through its new dealer portal, according to Adams, which will give dealers the ability to upsell and turn on certain features. “It gives them the ability to offer features and functionality where they couldn’t do it before,” Adams said. He also lauded the product’s light weight—1.5 ounces—and its small size.

The new device works on a 3g network and includes fall detection, geo-fencing and tracking capabilities in addition to its main help button. It device can also emit sound to help locate it if it is lost. The unit can notify specifically identified contacts if the user leaves the geo-fenced area; it will also notify these contacts when the user reenters the zone, Adams said.

“If somebody pushes the SOS [button], that’s the only time that it goes to a monitoring center—or if somebody falls,” Adams said.

“If the dealer wants us to brand it, we will brand it for the dealer,” Adams said. In certain events, key contacts will be sent a map, showing the user’s location and even this map can be white-labeled for the dealer, Adams said.

The company’s first solution, a PERS device called the MediPendant, was sold direct to consumer through big box stores and is being phased out over the next six months. While Wearable Health Solutions will services MediPendant, “The business going forward is going to be strictly with dealers, and with a dealer program, for the iHelp + 3G,” Adams said.

The company had a middle step between selling the MediPendant direct to consumer, and it’s 3G device to dealers. “In the interim, while we were developing this [3G] product, we came out with a 2G product, which got us into the field and enabled us to understand … the cellular space a little bit better and the dealer space a little bit better,” Adams said.

The company had a dealer portal for its 2G offering, originally called the iHelp, to learn more about the needs of the company’s dealers, Loria said. The original iHelp is no longer being sold.

NAPLES, Fla.—Attendees at Affiliated Monitoring’s Catalyst conference walked away with advice on how to start or advance a PERS business, such as devoting resources specifically to PERS sales and marketing and understanding which technology to sell.